Past's warm glow — gaslights — still alive in Worcester

Sunday

Apr 13, 2014 at 6:00 AMNov 1, 2016 at 10:08 PM

By Thomas Caywood TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

WORCESTER — They've been knocked aslant by wayward cars, snapped by falling trees, targeted by pellet gun snipers and periodically marked for extinction by forward-looking mayors and city managers since the 1950s.

And, yet, a few remaining gaslights, some of them more than a century old, continue to cast a warm Victorian glow on parts of modern Worcester. Twenty-seven gaslamp street lights have survived here for generations alongside their more luminous, coarser electric replacements.

"They look so much nicer than an electric light. I wish there were more of the them throughout the city. But times change," said John Corazzini, who tends to the illumination artifacts in his spare time.

Mr. Corazzini, a maintenance supervisor at a local charter school, inherited the responsibility for the city's gaslights about 15 years ago from his wife's family.

His work cleaning and repairing the quaint old lights while perched atop a ladder often arouses the curiosity of passers-by.

Until the 1920s, Worcester's streets were lighted by thousands of them.

It took many decades, but eventually the harsh glare of high-pressure sodium lights vanquished the warm glow of gaslights block by block.

The city's former legion of perhaps 2,000 gaslights had thinned to 601 by 1946 and then dwindled further to 295 by 1962, according to newspaper accounts from those years.

The first City Hall efforts, unsuccessful as it turned out, to systematically uproot all the remaining cast iron gaslights began in the early 1950s. A headline from January 1963 proclaimed: "Plan would eliminate all city's gaslights."

That plan didn't succeed either.

But errant cars, falling trees and vandals were succeeding slowly where unsentimental city officials had failed.

Fewer than 60 gaslights made it to the early 1970s.

When Robert Fiore went to work at the city Department of Public Works and Parks in 1987, the inventory of gaslamp street lights had fallen to just 28.

But only one has been lost since. A gaslight on Elm Street across from Elm Park was damaged beyond repair during the December 2008 ice storm.

"A massive tree came down and crushed every piece and every part of that light," recalled Mr. Fiore, an assistant to the public works commissioner. "By the time they cleared the tree, the gas company had already come out and taken out the line to it."

A 1912 gaslight on Colton Street caught fire a few years ago, and the natural gas-fed flames erupting from the pole melted much of the light assembly. The cast iron base was salvageable, though, and Mr. Corazzini expects to rebuild the light from spare parts this spring.

The long slide to extinction for Worcester's gaslights seems to have been halted at 27 for now.

Despite the suspicions of some wary residents who live near them, Mr. Fiore said the city plans to keep the left over Victorian curiosities burning as long as possible. The cost of running a gaslight is comparable to an electric light, he said.

"As long as we can get parts, and we have a guy like John that has a love for these things and knows how to take care of them, I'd like to say we'll have them in Worcester forever," he said.

This past Tuesday, after a stormy winter that often stranded his gaslights in tall snowbanks, Mr. Corazzini loaded some spare parts in his pickup and began calling on his charges to assess their conditions.

On Mount Hope Terrace and Farnum Street, both off Institute Road, Mr. Corazzini went light to light with his green ladder to replace broken mesh mantles and clean the lenses, the glass or clear plastic cylinders that shield the gas flame and glowing mantle from wind.

His father-in-law Paul Sestito Sr., a retired gas company worker, took care of these same lights and the others for two decades until his death in 1996. Mr. Sestito's son, Paul Sestito Jr., took over the work for a few years until he moved to Vermont.

Before he headed north, Mr. Sestito recommended his brother-in-law as a possible replacement. Mr. Corazzini, 52, has tended the city's gaslights ever since as a kind of cross between a hobby and a laughably low-paying part-time job. The city pays him $130 a month, and he hasn't had a raise in 15 years, he quipped.

Perhaps the only people more wistful about Worcester's gaslights than Mr. Corazzini are the residents whose yards and sidewalks fall within their light.

Mr. Corazzini pointed out a gaslamp in front of a yellow house at the top of Mount Hope Terrace.

"Every time I worked on that one, the guy would come right out on the front porch and be like, 'What's going on? What are you doing?' I was waiting for him to come out with a shotgun," Mr. Corazzini joked.

Artist Christina O'Neill, who painted a series of watercolors of Worcester's gaslights five years ago, also learned how protective residents are of the lights when she went around photographing them for her project.

"If I went near one, a resident would come out and ask, 'Are you from the city? Are you going to be taking the gaslight out?' It was apparent to me people are real protective of them," Ms. O'Neill said.

The gaslights fascinated her as an artist because they represented something thoroughly outmoded, and yet still useful and beautiful, that has persisted alongside newer technology.

"What got me interested was wondering: Why are these still here?" Ms. O'Neill said. "I could see they were fed by live gas. I could see they weren't replicas like you have in a lot of cities."

Lance Schachterle, an English professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who happens to specialize in 19th-century literature, lives near one of the gaslamps on Mount Hope Terrace.